First off, let me introduce myself. I’m David Eriksson, the new Chief Product Officer at Reason Studios. I joined Reason Studios because I have had a life-long passion for music production and playing all kinds of instruments, as well as building user focused technology products. And my responsibility is managing Reason Studios’ product development overall. And of course, together with the fantastic Reason team, pioneer the music experience. 

Our vision for Reason is to make it the place where you get lost in the fun of serious music making. Opening Reason should never feel like a chore, but instead the place where you have more fun making music than anywhere else. When we add things to Reason we tend to choose things that we believe will make Reason more inspiring and help you generate more musical ideas.   

Since the release of Reason 12 we’ve been focused less on being creative and more focused on bug fixing. Not the most fun work but still very important–kind of like packing up the gear after a gig (no, we don’t have roadies either…). We’re doing this bug fixing to ensure the High-res graphics really work as well as they should, and that browser searching can’t cause any issues with performance. We will stick to fixing these core R12 issues for another few weeks, so we are a little behind on the roadmap we shared back in September. It’s worth mentioning that, for most users Reason 12 works perfectly, but for others it’s causing real issues. We know that stability is one of the things users love about Reason so we’re hard at work getting this right.  

At the same time though, we’re also getting prepared to dig into enabling native M1 and VST3 support. As a matter of fact, we see “enabling tech” overall as a core part of our roadmap for 2022. Reason has a huge number of creative instruments, effects and players. And we want to ensure that all content can be used in a stable way. Both as a plugin through other DAWs as well as standalone. We also want to ensure that our activation and user management works effectively. And is future proof. Because we intend to live forever!  

This means we’re going to stay focused on some under-the-hood tech work for a while. However, we will still release several devices per year – as well as provide you Reason+ users with new sound packs with curated patches each week. For you to get inspired, and to tweak – to sound like you. 

But what is really happening now and going forward? (And please remember, it is a plan, not a promise).  Under development  New Device – Bassline Generator (Player)  We will broaden our “Player” series with a new device which we feel complements the current Players nicely. The Bassline Generator! That’s all we can share for now, but keep your eyes and ears peeled for more information… it may land just in time to fill some Christmas stockings.   New Device – (Effect) 

Our next big device is a modern take on a classic effect, planned for early 2022. Co-founder and DSP guru Peter is locked away in the lab cooking up something amazing. We’re not quite ready to share more details yet but we think you’ll really like it! 

 Hi-res – Last fixes  Early January we think we are completely done and can move on with our lives. A huge transformation will come to an end, but very worth it and more future proof. 

Combinator – More control styles   

Broader selection of delightful Combinator buttons and knobs for even more options when making a fantastic Combinator panel. Will be added in a Reason update as soon as possible. 

 Native M1 support  

We will work on this during the first few months of 2022 and expect to have it enabled by May. Yes, we know this is later than previously anticipated, and all we can say to you with newly purchased Mac’s is…sorry. However, Rosetta in macOS still works great until Reason works natively on the Apple M1 processor. 

VST3 support  There are technical reasons for addressing VST3 in alignment with M1, therefore we will have the same ambition for the VST3 release as M1.  Under Investigation New devices   It is always part of our plan to release several creative devices during a year. And we are always eager to listen to you guys on what you are missing or what you have dreamt of. Please reach out to us on social media!  Authorization/Offline mode for Reason+ 

We have not forgotten about this key capability. We are investigating it and it is part of our next year plan! 

Pushed forward

Smart browser 

In our last blog post, we said we would further improve our browser to facilitate organizing the content better. However, we have decided to push this forward for now. The current browser is not stupid, it is already relatively smart, but at some point, we will make it even smarter.  —– That was all for now folks! And as always, let us know your feedback on Twitter and Facebook!  David Eriksson  Chief Product Officer @ Reason Studios